Unit dose articles are preferred by consumers because of their ease of use. Consumers are demanding multiple benefits from these unit dose articles. Examples include laundry unit dose articles which provide excellent cleaning in addition to excellent fabric care benefits. Such benefits may include: softness, reduced fabric wrinkles, less mechanical damage during washing, less pills/fuzz, and less colour transfer or fading. Other examples include automatic dishwashing unit dose articles which provide excellent cleaning benefits, such as stain removal, in addition to excellent rinsing.
However, meeting multiple needs often results in the unit dose article requiring ingredients which are incompatible or unstable in the same composition, such as cationic fabric softening agents in combination with anionic cleaning surfactants, or hueing dyes having an intense colour which would over-power the dye of the desired aesthetics colour, or rinse additives to be released in a cycle after the wash ingredients. Consequently, it is desirable to place such incompatible ingredients in separate compartments of the unit dose article.
Such multi-compartment unit dose articles create additional process challenges. While often being challenging to make, they are also challenging to recycle. The need to recycle multi-compartment unit dose articles may arise because of excess production, from trade-returns, and the like.
Single compartment unit dose articles can be recycled by shredding or crushing the unit dose article to release the contents. For example, WO2004/022447 discloses a process for reclaiming the contents by breaking the unit dose articles using breaker bars and paddles. Another process for recycling single compartment unit dose articles can be found in EP 1 462 513, which discloses a process for recycling unit dose article contents, by dissolving the encapsulating material and converting the contents into a solid or semi-solid.
As mentioned earlier, multi-compartment unit dose articles typically contain incompatible ingredients. Currently, such unit dose articles are scrapped, since existing recycling technologies, for instance as described above, combine the contents of the different compartments, and hence combine incompatible ingredients.
Consequently, a need remains for a means to recycle multi-compartment unit dose articles, while avoiding significant cross-contamination between the contents of the individual compartments.